Discover how shifting from active income to long-term wealth can transform your real estate business. In this episode, Martin Richardson shares how she went from wholesaling to building a rental portfolio that generates consistent cash flow and true financial freedom.

She breaks down how to acquire your first rental with little to no money, structure deals safely, and think like a long-term investor. The conversation also dives into practical strategies for reducing tenant issues, improving property quality, and creating systems that make rentals as close to passive as possible.

If you’re looking to move beyond one-off deals and start building assets that grow over time, this episode delivers a clear, experience-backed roadmap to get started.

About Martine Richardson

Martine Richardson is a real estate investor and mentor who built her portfolio from the ground up, completing over 100 deals across wholesaling and rental properties. After starting in wholesaling, she discovered the power of long-term wealth through rentals and shifted her focus to building cash-flowing assets that create true financial freedom.

Today, she helps aspiring investors buy their first or next rental property using little to none of their own money, while teaching proven strategies for deal structuring, tenant selection, and building systems that make real estate investing more scalable and sustainable.

Important Links

Watch & Listen

• The Freedom Inc. – Free community for rental property investors 👉 Join on Facebook: search “The Free To Me”
• Strategy Session – Map out how to buy your first or next rental with little to none of your own money 👉 strategy.thefreetome.com
• ThatRealEstateTechGuy.com – All episodes and exclusive tech discounts

I can tell you one thing: technology is the single most important aspect of every business that has successfully scaled.

It’s time for That Real Estate Tech Guy, your weekly chance to explore how technology can help your real estate business explode. Each week, you’ll hear from real estate investors who have been there and done that, and discover their favorite technology tips.

Listen in as Jordan speaks with tech companies and explores new technologies and ideas that can help you scale your business. Now join your host, Jordan Samuel Fleming, CEO of smrtPhone, for this week’s episode.

Hey everybody, welcome to this week’s episode of That Real Estate Tech Guy. I’m your host, Jordan Samuel Fleming, and this week I’ve got a really fun episode with Martine Richardson from The Freedom Inc.

Martine really dives into something I don’t think I’ve ever had on this podcast before, which is how to get started in rentals and how you can get your first rental with little to none of your own money. There were a lot of fun moments in this conversation. First of all, she’s got a great story.

She’s been there, done it, and figured it out. She’s built up her portfolio, her business, and her assets from the ground up. She understands exactly what it means to do this for real, and that matters. The credibility of having done it before makes her message and her information incredibly relevant, because you know it comes from lived experience.

We also had some great conversations. One of my favorites was around doing a little more for your property to make sure your tenants are happy and that the property stays in good shape. That gets you better tenants and fewer problems. I think sometimes there’s a mindset of, “I’ll just throw it together and make it good enough for someone to move in,” but she advocates the idea of, “I don’t want any problems for five years.”

She’s doing this so she doesn’t have problems. So if the water heater looks like it’s on its way out, she’s just going to replace it. That way, she’s buying herself freedom and time because she invested that little bit extra in the property. I thought that was a really good conversation.

Anyway, super fun. Martine is fantastic to listen to, has great experience, and dropped some really great wisdom. After you’ve listened to this podcast, please check out her links and her free community. The links will be in the description. Let’s head over to the conversation now.

I’m live with Martine from The Freedom Inc. Martine, welcome to the podcast. Give us a little introduction to you.

Sure. Thanks for having me on today. I’m looking forward to adding some gold nuggets because I don’t know about you, Jordan, but I always like to give people something they can use after a podcast to put some money in their pocket. I’ve actually learned a lot of things from podcasts that put money in my pocket.

Just a little bit about me. I don’t know if this is unique or not, but my journey into real estate started with wholesaling. So hearing that you have a lot of people who wholesale, I think they can relate to a lot of the things I’ve gone through.

I started with wholesaling, and I got my first rental property by accident. I never knew I was going to be a rental property person, but basically I would go into everybody’s house and ask, “Do you want a cash offer, or would you take payments?” Everybody would say they wanted the cash offer until I got the guy who said he’d take the payments.

I don’t know if this guy knows this, but he truly changed the trajectory of my career because I started making money from a deal I had done a long time ago. Up until that point, I didn’t make money unless I worked. It was truly the freedom I had been seeking. So when I saw that, it really made me dive into the world of rental property investing.

If we fast-forward to where I am today, I’ve closed on over 100 deals. That’s wholesaling, rentals, and everything in between. Now I help people buy their first or next rental property using little to none of their own money.

Fantastic. Well, let’s talk a little bit about that. When we think of the market we’re in right now, I think pretty much everybody would say it’s a little weird. Things are changing, and people have to start looking at diversifying their strategies because what worked for a long time may not work in the same way now.

In some places it can still work just as well, but this is a time when people should be thinking things through and not just following the same old path. So if you’re a wholesaler by nature, and a lot of our customers are, why should someone think about getting that first rental property? What does that get them that’s different from the wholesale experience?

That’s a great question. I think it all comes back to your goals. Why did you get into this? I hear a lot of people say they got into this because they want freedom. They want time freedom. They want money freedom. But then they just find themselves with a high-paying job. They wholesale, they flip, they do all the active stuff, and they say, “Oh, I’m making so much money.”

Yeah, but you’re working all the time too. It depends on what you want. I know that I wanted time and money freedom, and that’s what owning rental properties and having systems in place does for me. It allows the asset to do the work.

Just to give you guys a quick example, that first rental property I bought, I still own. I bought that rental property for $35,000. Lucky for me, I didn’t have to put too much work into it. That house right now is worth $240,000. And what has Martine done to make it worth $240,000? Nothing. I let the asset do the work for me.

It’s a different mindset. It’s more long-term. Yeah, maybe you’re making $500 a month, $1,000 a month, or $1,500 a month off that property once you pay all the expenses. But growing a portfolio means building something sustainable. People are always going to need a place to live.

There are all these laws going on right now trying to stop people from wholesaling. They’re adding hoops like, “Oh, you’ve got to be a realtor,” or “You can only do one deal here,” and all of that. Yes, you can get around it, but it makes things harder. With rentals, if I don’t feel like working today, I don’t have to, because my asset is doing the work for me.

I’ve created systems so that it’s not 100% passive, but it’s 90% passive. You still have to check your systems to make sure everything is going the way it’s supposed to, but it allows you to have a different kind of life. It’s not all hustle, hustle, hustle.

Hustle is supposed to be for a season. You get to a point where you don’t want to be hustling at 60 years old. Come on. It’s time to enjoy your life. You don’t need to hustle your entire life.

I think you bring up a really good point there around the portfolio and the assets, because wholesaling is a great way to get a relatively quick paycheck. But paychecks disappear. In fact, the more you get, the quicker they seem to disappear, because somehow you were able to struggle by at $6,000 a month, but now you’re making $20,000 a month and still struggling by.

What I really like about this is the idea of building assets as well. Not only can you build cash-flowing assets that add up over time, but you’re also holding and building an asset stack that will probably appreciate and give you leverage in the future. You’ve got both sides of the rental equation.

Right. And you’re coming from a different angle too. For instance, let’s say you’re brand new and starting now. You want to go to the bank, you want to do multifamily, you want to do commercial, whatever you want to do. You don’t look the same to the bank if you have no assets as you do if you have some.

When you have assets, your personal financial statement shows that you’ve been doing this already. Not to say, “I’m somebody,” but it shows you know what you’re talking about because you’ve been doing it. That’s a different story.

And it’s a nice way to get in because a lot of people think, “Oh, I need to save up all this money so I can buy a rental property.” I don’t know how many times I’ve heard, “I’m going to flip and wholesale until I’m able to buy rental properties.” But if your goal is freedom and passive income, and all you do is active things, that doesn’t make sense. You can start doing that now. You just have to know how to structure those deals so they make sense for you.

So let’s talk about that. I think you hit it exactly. Most people in my experience look at the holding position and think, “Oh, when I can…” First I’ve got to build up, then I’ve got to do this, and so on. The problem with that logic is that the more you do, the more you spend.

You go from doing one wholesale deal a month to two, and chances are you’re still waiting because now you’ve got a better car, a better whatever. So tell me a little bit about that. If someone is in that mindset, how easy is it to switch into the side of the business where you can actually get started on a cash-flowing rental pretty easily? What does it mean to get started?

I’m going to put the personal expense stuff to the side for now, because you make a really good point about how you start making more money and mysteriously your expenses increase so much. We’ll put that to the side for now and talk about structure and deals first.

If you wholesale, you’re actually in a really good position to buy rental properties. I’m going to tell you why. You already know how to spot a good deal. Everything in real estate investing starts with a good deal. The only things you’re missing are maybe not knowing how to raise the capital so you can fund the deal, how to structure the deal so somebody’s capital is safe, or how to create a system to vet tenants so you don’t end up with people who get on your nerves.

I have three things I look for in a tenant. One, somebody who pays on time. Two, somebody who bothers me minimally. And three, somebody who is not going to tear the place up. I want this to be easy. I don’t want it to be hard. And you can do preventative things to make sure you get those kinds of people.

To go into a little more detail, if you’re buying a property or wholesaling, let’s say you got the property at 50% of what it’s worth. So you already spotted a good deal. When you’re giving that deal or selling that deal to a buyer, a lot of these buyers want to be 70% all-in. Not every single one, but a lot of them.

So you already know how to work backward from that in your numbers. Let’s say the house is worth $100,000 just to make it easy. If the all-in number is $70,000, and this particular property needs $20,000 in repairs, and you got it for $50,000, then it sounds like this may work for that 70% rule.

The whole point of that 70% rule is to make sure whoever’s capital is on the property is in a safe position. You don’t want to put somebody’s money at 100% of what the property is worth, because that’s not safe. Even banks don’t like to do that.

When you go get a mortgage and they say, “If I get FHA, I only have to put 3% down,” yeah, but you also have to pay mortgage insurance because that’s risky for them too. They need insurance in case you don’t pay. So 70% is where you want to be all-in.

Now what you have to get better at as a wholesaler is building relationships with people who can lend on your deals. You want to create win-win situations where you can get private capital, put it on your deal, do what you need to do, put the tenant in there, and then the last step is refinancing it into a 30-year mortgage.

Now one thing I want to mention, because I hear this a lot, is: “Oh, my credit isn’t where it needs to be. I can’t refinance into a 30-year mortgage.”

I’m glad you said that, because when I first started, my situation was pretty bad. My car had just gotten repossessed, and the very next day is when I started taking real estate seriously. So you can imagine what my credit looked like. It was really bad.

If I was able to do the things I needed to do to get my credit where it needed to be so I could refinance into a 30-year mortgage, I’m sure you can too. What I like to tell people in those situations is that your credit right now is not your life sentence. Once you learn how it works, you can fix it. You can structure a deal so you have enough time to do what you need to do.

I just feel like a lot of these reasons are really excuses for why you’re not going after what you really want.

And when you mentioned the three things you want from tenants, right, you want them to pay, you want them to create the least amount of hassle, and you want them not to tear the place apart. Those are pretty good three.

But I suppose part of someone’s journey into getting rental properties is understanding both the finance side and the tenant side. Sometimes you’ll find a deal that is naturally a great fit for wholesaling. Sometimes you’ll find a deal that suits rentals better because of the location, being near schools, or whatever that is.

But if you’ve never dealt with tenants before, I think that can scare people. They’re either thinking, “Am I going to lose margin by giving it to a property management company?” or “Am I going to lose my mind dealing with people 24/7?” So when you talk to people who are getting into this, how do you help them understand what it’s really like to get started with tenants?

I’m going to speak from my experience. When I first became a landlord, I was terrible at it. I was so bad. I want to make sure you guys aren’t terrible like I was.

The reason I was terrible is that I would just fix up the properties enough so people could move in. “Oh, that’s good enough. They can move in.” If your money was green, you could rent from me. That is a terrible philosophy.

I was always in eviction court. I got a whole lot of maintenance calls. It was terrible. So I had to learn how to make this easier for myself, because it felt like another job, and I didn’t want it to be.

When people vet tenants, they usually think about checking income and credit. That’s normal. But one thing I like to do, which I really feel is the secret sauce, is check people’s behaviors.

Your credit tells you some things about behavior, but it tells you after it’s been going on for a long time. It doesn’t tell you everything. For instance, I have a landlord verification sheet. I reach out to all of a prospective tenant’s previous landlords and ask what kind of tenant they were.

One of the questions on there is, “How many times was this person late paying rent?” They could have been late 20 times, but if it never made it to eviction court, I would never know that just by looking at their credit.

I had one lady I was vetting, and I remember talking to a previous landlord. The landlord said she had never been late and had lived there for 20 years. I asked how difficult it was to get into the house for inspections. “Not hard.” I asked how they left the house when they moved out. “It looked fine.”

Then I asked a question that wasn’t on my verification form. I was just curious. I said, “Why did you let them leave?”

That seemed like a dream tenant, so I wanted to know what was going on. She said, “Well, my house was in such disrepair that I couldn’t fix it with them living in it.”

So they went from living in a bad house to a house I had just renovated. And I thought, this is amazing. Let me get this person into my house.

And here’s a little more secret sauce: the landlord they’re living with right now may lie because they just want to get rid of them. They may say, “Oh, they’re great,” just because they want them gone. But the landlord before that one has nothing to lose. They’ll tell you the truth.

If the person was late 20 times or hard to deal with, that older landlord will tell you. Keep that in mind.

I love that, by the way. It’s sort of like job references. The person who’s trying to get rid of someone might be a little too generous, but the person who is no longer affected can be more honest.

Right, right, right. And that made me trust her even more because I thought, they don’t even live there anymore, and this previous landlord is still speaking highly of them.

So they ended up moving into a house I had recently renovated. I thought, wow, this is going to be great. I’m not going to have to worry about major maintenance concerns because I made sure everything was in place.

And by vetting this person properly, checking income and all of that too, but really paying attention to behavior, I got someone who pays on time and even pays early. It’s because I checked their behaviors. If I see a behavior I don’t like, I’m going to rent to someone else. I don’t want a headache. I want somebody who is going to treat this place like it’s their home.

So that’s one part of the equation. The second part is the quality of the product you’re giving people. Are you just making it good enough? Because that’s what I used to do.

I used to make it good enough, and then it would be 20 degrees outside and everyone’s HVAC would go out, the hot water would be gone, and the pipes would burst. Everything would happen at once because I wasn’t giving a good enough product.

Now, when I’m renovating a property, my goal is for it to be maintenance-free for the first five years. So if I see a water heater that still works but looks like it might go next year or the year after, I’m just going to change it now because I don’t want the headache.

It’s about being proactive. Do yearly inspections. Stay ahead of maintenance so you’re not getting calls at weird hours of the night about this breaking or that breaking. It may not feel like an emergency to you, but it is to the person living there.

So the goal is to be proactive so you have fewer headaches. Is it 100% foolproof? No. But it does make your life a lot easier.

What I really like about that is that it made me think about buying a used car from a good dealership and getting the warranty. If you buy a pre-owned car from Toyota, they’ll give you the three-year warranty because they’ve taken the car back in, checked it over, and fixed it up. They’re doing that because they don’t want more hassle from you.

They’re saying, “I’m going to make sure this thing is good because I want to make the most amount of money from you and spend the least amount of time with you.”

I love the way you put that, because I see two types of people when they refurbish houses for rentals. There’s a very small group who are weirdly obsessed with putting all sorts of high-end stuff in there, which often doesn’t make sense. Then there’s the much larger group who are just doing the bare minimum, not to get five years of peace, but just enough to get someone moved in.

What you’re saying is that when you do just enough, you may be buying yourself trouble. But if you take the “Toyota warranty” approach, you’re buying yourself five years of peace. You’re also building credibility, because the best tenants are the ones who stay the longest. That becomes a mutually beneficial cycle instead of a relationship where the tenant hates the landlord because the place is always falling apart.

Exactly. And one thing I like to do, because I want people to feel like they own the home, is make them feel proud of it. I want them to take care of it.

So a lot of times I’ll be in a neighborhood that doesn’t necessarily need granite countertops or an open floor plan, but I’ll still do some of those things because it makes them feel like they’re buying a house.

They’ll say, “Oh my God, this is for rent? This is such a nice house.” I try to make it a place they’ll want to stay in for a long time.

I have tenants all the time telling me, “You’re such a great landlord. I really love the house. I just need something bigger. Do you have another house I can move into?”

And if you’re a great tenant, I love hearing that, because I already know you’re good. You’ve already proven yourself. Let me find another place where you can be happy.

I’m helping their life, but they’re also helping my life. They’re helping make my life more passive. They’re helping me become wealthier because my net worth is growing every single month when they pay the mortgage for me and the asset appreciates.

So why wouldn’t I want to give people a really good-quality product? Why wouldn’t I want my tenants to be happy? I want you to stay here forever. I want the only reason you move to be because you’re about to buy a house, and I might even try to find one for you to buy.

I think that’s a really underappreciated part of this. A little bit of effort in the property and in the landlord-tenant relationship goes a long way toward turning this into an easy, cash-flowing model.

No effort, on the other hand, can easily turn it into a pain, suck up your time, and create a whole bunch of issues you didn’t want in the first place.

Exactly. More money, more stress. A lot of people out there say, “Oh my God, I hate rentals.” It’s because they had that experience. The tenants always complain, they have to chase rent, and they deal with all the stuff they don’t want to do.

They say, “This is supposed to be passive. Why isn’t it passive?” It’s because they didn’t have the proper systems in place to make it passive.

It’s not 100% passive. I’ll say that. But it can get very close when the systems are good.

I’m going to selfishly point out some of our own systems here, because you’re not a property management company, but we’ve got our new smart agents, the voice AI agents, and there are two property management ones. One is already live, and one is being finished now.

The one that’s already live is a 24/7 maintenance help agent. It’s an AI voice agent that answers the phone around the clock, knows the property, knows the tenant, knows the case history, and can classify and escalate urgencies.

That’s a great example of a system you can put in place to create a self-running machine with minimal input from you, which is what you’re really looking for.

Exactly. I love that.

The maintenance one is my favorite. We’ve got a couple of property management companies using it right now, and they’ve replaced the VAs who were answering maintenance calls. You want tenants to be able to reach help 24/7, and the only way to do that is to either give out your personal phone number or have a system.

So let’s pivot now to your community. You obviously have the experience, you’ve done it, you’ve built yourself up, you’ve built your own investment company, and you’ve built your asset base.

First of all, what made you decide to start helping other people? And what’s the key to engaging with your community?

The first answer is probably a little cliché. A lot of coaches and consultants do it because they wish they had that kind of help when they started. I probably would have started buying rental properties way sooner if I had.

Now, I will say I’ve had coaches and mentors throughout my journey. For example, when I mentioned earlier that I would ask sellers, “Do you want a cash offer or would you take payments?” a mentor told me to do that. He said, “Just ask people and see what they say.” I thought, all they can say is no, right?

So I’ve always looked up to people who were where I wanted to be. Even if they told me something that sounded a little crazy, I would still do it because they were where I wanted to be.

I really like to put it in perspective like this: some people want to give you advice, but they are not where you want to be. They’ll say, “Do this, do that,” and I’m like, “Okay, how did that work for you?” If you didn’t do it yourself, I’m not listening.

So I’ve always valued real mentorship for myself.

I also used to have a monthly meetup, and I have a podcast called the Do It Movement Podcast, if you guys want to go subscribe. I started to see that I could make money from doing the meetup and the podcast. People would come up to me all the time and ask, “Do you mentor? Do you coach?” And I’d say, “No, I’m really just building my portfolio right now, but I’d be happy to do a deal with you.”

That’s where I was in my life at the time.

Then my first coach, the first person I actually started making money from by following what he said, told me, “You should be a coach.”

I didn’t mention this earlier, but I have a three-year-old daughter. He told me that maybe four years ago. At the time I was pregnant, we were moving, and it just wasn’t the right time.

Once I got settled down and got back into a good routine, I realized I needed to get back into coaching. I was finally in a place where we were financially free and our passive income covered all our expenses. That felt like the right time to start helping other people.

So I got a coach first, because I knew how to do real estate, but I didn’t know how to coach in a way that was effective and worth it. I didn’t want a lot of people wasting my time.

So I got a coach, started coaching, and honestly, the amount of fulfillment you get when someone else does what you say and it works is even greater than just doing it for yourself.

You found a path that changed your life, and now you’re sharing it with other people and seeing it change their lives in real time. You see the emotion behind it. They’ve been trying to do this for so long, and now it’s finally clicking. That gives you a whole different sense of fulfillment.

I’m also very community-oriented. I’m big on giving. So it makes me feel good.

And honestly, there are only two reasons I charge for coaching. First, so people take it seriously and invest in themselves. Second, because I want people to actually do it.

Free is never really free. People think free is great, but free often makes people lazy. Easy come, easy go. When people subscribe only to free tools and free access, it’s easy to click something free. It’s way harder when you have to put your hand in your pocket.

And to your point, you’re much more likely to take it seriously. I told so many people what to do, and they wouldn’t do it. It made me feel like I was wasting my time.

So that’s how I got into it, and I’ve been loving it. We’ve built a community. I do have a free community, even though we just talked about free. It has almost 900 people in it. Then I have a paid community as well, which is the fam.

In the free community, we give people a lot of resources. We have live trainings. It’s really there to help people figure out whether this is even worth it for them before they make a full commitment.

And for the wholesalers listening to this, we have a lot of buyers in there who are looking to buy and hold. I don’t know how many times you’ve heard wholesalers say, “Oh, this is a buy-and-hold opportunity,” when really the price is too high for a flip.

But I just want to say we have a lot of people who would buy those wholesale deals because they’re genuinely looking to build their portfolios.

Nothing lends credibility to a coach like someone who has done it before. We look for people who have been there, seen it, done it, and with your story and your experience, that’s a really valuable part of working with you.

And even beyond the tactics, sometimes just having a coach who can give you perspective when things go slightly wrong is worth a lot. Because things will go wrong at some point.

So I appreciate that.

As we close this out, how can people get in touch with you? How can they interact with you and learn more about your program? I’ll put the links in the show notes, but tell everybody where they can find you.

The absolute best way is to join the free community. It’s called The Free-dom Inc. If you’re looking at this video, I have the shirt on. It’s on Facebook.

So go to Facebook and type in The Free-dom Inc. I can send you a link that goes directly to the group. We have a few questions to answer, but as long as you answer them, we’ll let you in.

And for the people who are serious about buying your first or next rental property this year and want to learn how to do it with little to none of your own money, you can apply for a strategy session.

In the strategy session, we map out what that looks like for your personal circumstances and how you can make that happen this year.

To book a strategy session, go to strategy.thefreedominc.com and fill that out, and we’ll be in contact with you.

Fantastic. Well, Martine, that was an absolute pleasure. It was our first time chatting, and I really enjoyed it. I know we’re going to see each other in person relatively soon.

Thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.

Yeah, no problem. I really enjoyed this. If anybody wants to stay in touch, just be sure to join the free group. I’m in there a lot, so it is me. It’s not a bot. It’s not an AI agent. It is me, so you can interact with me directly.

Fantastic. Well, thanks everybody for watching, and have a great week.

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